Pursuits of Happiness

“Marriage is always divorce, always entails a rupture from something” – Stanley Cavell

This weekend I’m reading Stanley Cavell’s book Pusuits of Happiness, which is a series of readings of what Cavell calls the remarriage comedies of the 1930s and ’40s–movies like The Awful Truth, Bringing up Baby, The Lady Eve, &c.

I suppose this warrants an explanation. Cavell basically claims a heritage of artistic statements about divorce that I’m more or less trying to rip off and represent as my own. Or at least that’s how I think of my project whenever I get discouraged about it.

The sense in which I’m committing plagiarism: Cavell mentions the works that I would like to use, and he does so in pretty much the same context that I’m talking about them. Two senses in which I’m not committing plagiarism: (1) Cavell reads chronologically, so that Milton (gently) informs the movies he’s talking about, whereas I’m interested mostly in doing an anachronistic reading of Milton in which the movies (gently) inform Milton’s ideas; (2) In Cavell’s argument, Milton’s concept of divorce initiates a trend that in the 20th Century culminates in a democratic, (relatively) healthy notion of marriage–I, on the other hand, will spend some time talking about the ways that Milton’s ideas about divorce promote the women-as-chattel take on marriage.

Anyway, the book is a real pleasure to read. It was interesting in revisiting this book to find that Cavell self-consciously models his critique as a “conversation” (see “DDD” below). While the common reading is that Hollywood fast talk (which the comedies he’s talking about are famous for) is a throwback to Shakespearean dialogue, Cavell suggests that it might actually be read as an instance of Miltonic marital conversation. And he wants to share this with his reader, I guess…so it’s sort of like he’s proposing to you while you read the book. Or something.

This is the part of my project that I’m least confident about. I know that I have plenty to say about Milton and divorce, and that I could do it using close readings (Joel Fineman and Lana Cable being two incredibly different scholarly models), using scholarly/readerly surveys (Stanley Fish being the only scholarly model), using history/biography (Kim Hall and James Grantham Turner being the scholarly models), or with movies (Aaron Kunin being the scholarly model, I guess). The latter option sounds like the most entertaining, and it’s worked out OK in a couple other things that I’ve done, but I’m not sure that I’m capable of mustering the critical bravado necessary to sustain the method over 70+ pages. But the thing is, while I like Kim Hall and Lana Cable pretty well, I get a sort of bad taste in my mouth when I read Turner, and Stanley Fish is hard to discount not because he’s such a great or even necessarily smart critic but because he deliberately structures his arguments to look like bear traps that you’ve already stepped in.

If I go the movie route, I’ll obviously have to come up with a new way to do it. I’m just not sure it’s worth it.

DDD

“A meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage.”

I spent all afternoon yesterday re-immersing myself in Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which is the most famous of the divorce tracts.

It struck me that the key word in this work is “conversation.” Milton’s argument is that canon law–which allows for divorce only in the case of failure to consummate a marriage–must be incomplete, because to take it literally would be to render sex the most significant aspect of marriage. This, Milton says, is un-Christian. (Here Milton yokes together the Old Testament and the New Testament in a pretty interesting way. He also displays some Cartesian hatred of the body.)

Instead, Milton says, marriage should be based on intellectual/spiritual communion between husband and wife. The word he uses for this is “conversation,” as in the above quotation. Far worse than having a spouse who is impotent or adulterous, Milton says, is having a spouse who is “mute” or “unfit for conversation.”

In Milton’s account of marriage, there are two things that you can do only with your spouse: talking and fucking. As far as Milton is concerned, talking is way better.

(It’s interesting, too, that Milton’s remedy for the “irrational heat” of sexual desire is a “frugal diet.” It’s as if he wants all meaningful human functions to take place via the mouth.)

The question, of course, is: What does Milton mean by “conversation” such that you only converse–in the proper, Miltonic sense–with your spouse?

I’ve also been taking a closer look at Lana Cable’s book Carnal Rhetoric, which has a really good chapter on the Doctrine. One prong of her thesis is that Milton works his argument from the top down, such that the argument’s teleology informs each of its subservient terms. (This is different from circular logic–trust me. Or, I should say, trust Lana Cable.) This allows Milton to make words mean whatever he needs them to mean. Most often this occurs in opposite pairs: “Divorce” ends up meaning either “marriage” or “the salvation of marriage.” If, for Milton, sex and conversation are polar opposites, then I would add that “talking” probably means “fucking,” too, or at least it can mean that when Milton deems it necessary.

Am I back to square one yet? I think so.

Milton and Divorce

My thesis project was conceived in the following way: I thought “I’m interested in Milton and I’m interested in divorce. Milton was also interested in divorce. This may prove a fruitful avenue of inquiry.” Not inspiring, I know, but there it is.

Milton, of course, wrote multiple prose treatises on the topic of divorce. He was an early supporter of what we might call Divorce-on-Demand (this was just one of a handful of dangerously unpopular causes that Milton aligned himself with). For Milton, every argument was necessarily a theological one–his radical Protestant ideas and cutely idiosyncratic theology informed (or at least in some cases were made to support) his views on divorce.

A (personal) problem: Milton’s prose treatises are incredibly boring to read.

A solution: Many of Milton’s major works (e.g., Paradise Lost, “Samson Agonistes”) deal at least in part with marital relationships. If Dalila refuses to rubber-stamp the deaths of her family and country-people out of loyalty to her husband, shouldn’t Samson be able to dump her and get a new wife? Well, the logical answer for Milton’s 17th-Century contemporaries is “No,” but Milton’s answer might just be “Hell yes!” In this wise, I hope to spend some time squaring the marriages in Milton’s poems with the arguments about marriage in his prose.

A second solution: I hope to involve various other artistic takes on marriage in my discussion of Milton. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a good example. Also, the so-called screwball comedies of the 1930’s–e.g., Bringing up Baby, The Awful Truth, et cetera (the wonderful Stanley Cavell makes this immense leap of logic possible in the context of my as yet imaginary argument). I’m not interested in comparing and contrasting, but I am interested in echoes and corrections that surface over time in different works of art.

Finally: Without spending too much time fishing for biographical [bass], I think it will be worthwhile to consider the personal stakes that Milton had in the discourse on divorce. I hope to spend some time investigating how this may have influenced the direction that Milton’s radical take on divorce would eventually take. After all, he published his first tract in favor of divorce shortly after his first marriage “exploded.”